Congratulations to Maurice Lim Miller, and An-My Le. Both have been selected as 2012 MacArthur Fellows which carries a $500,000 no-strings-attached support.

MacArthur Foundation announced today 23 new MacArthur Fellows for 2012. The recipients learned, through a phone call out of the blue from the Foundation, that they will each receive $500,000 in no-strings-attached support over the next five years.

One of the recipients is Oakland, California's Maurice Lim Miller, 66, a leader in the development of services and systems designed to break the cycle of economic dependency for low-income families across the United States.  

Frustrated by the frequent recidivism into poverty he witnessed during his two decades with Asian Neighborhood Design, an agency focused on tenant rights, job training, and youth development, Lim Miller founded the Family Independence Initiative (FII) in 2001 with the goal of helping low-income working families—who often struggle in isolated circumstances or without clear direction—build their own pathways to self-sufficiency. FII has evolved into a national model that taps into the initiative and capability of low-income households to maximize their own networks and resources and guide themselves out of poverty.

You Are Good Enough

By Marilyn Tam

They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them. 

 ~Mahatma Gandhi

Events are conspiring to hurtle me into my distant past, to my childhood years in Oakland’s Chinatown, where my sisters, brothers and I served time at our restaurant, the New Eastern Café.

First, there was the closing of the Silver Dragon, an institution among restaurants in Chinatown; one of the first ones built for banquets and special events. Since 1974, when it settled in at Ninth and Webster Streets, it was a gathering place for the community, whether it was a young couple on a date or a family hosting a red egg and ginger party or a wedding banquet.

It’s being replaced by Asian Health Services, and that organization had a fundraising dinner gala the other night at the nearby Marriott, with 600 people in attendance. The featured entertainment was a tribute to the Chee family, the clan behind the Dragon.

Sherry Hu, the MC for the event, asked me to speak as part of the tribute, and, although I didn’t have the time, I made time.

You see, my family’s restaurant was sold, in 1954, to the Chees, who turned it into the first Silver Dragon. I was nine years old then, but my time at 710 Webster Street helped shape my life.

As I told the audience at the Marriott, the title of my memoirs, The Rice Room, is about a space in the back of that restaurant. “We were all in the rice room,” I said, “where rice, soy sauce and children were stored.

 October 8, 2012

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka - Photo by Chris Goodfellow Gladstone Institutes SF

 The world of medicine has taken a huge leap forward with the startling discoveries by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, 50, and British researcher Sir John Gurdon, 79.

Yamanaka and Gurdon are winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine announced today for their joint discoveries in stem cells.

As a post-doctorate scientist at Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, Yamanaka began what would become his life's work to unlock the code to creating stem cells.

By 2006, he succeeded in unlocking the code, furthering the research published in 1962 by Sir John Gurdon, who now works for the University of Cambridge.

The groundbreaking discoveries prove that it is possible to take genetic material from any cell in the body, such as skin cells, and tranplant and reprogram them into a stem cell to become any other cells in the body. 

Dr. Yamanaka, currently a professor at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan still works and commutes monthly to San Francisco for Gladstone, which is affiliated with the health-sciences institution University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). 

Related stories:

Nobelprize.org

Nobel medicine prize goes to SF scientist by Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle